Research

Under the Arctic Ice

Can the
medium of glass open up new ways of thinking about the complexities of silence
and sound? As a 2012–13 Fulbright grant recipient, Mara Streberger MFA 12 GL spent the winter months of her year
abroad in Baffin Bay, Greenland, exploring this question as she learned the
ways of the Inuit.

Streberger’s
original Fulbright proposal was to use glass to interpret the sophisticated
language of the narwhal (a small arctic whale species), its ecosystem and the
impact of humans on both. But after missing the narwhals on their annual migration,
she ended up accompanying her Inuit guides in pursuit of other arctic prey,
including beluga whales.

“I spent
most of my time in a tiny, traditional settlement in the northwest of
Greenland, where it’s much less European,” Streberger explains. “I became so
interested in the Inuit culture. I was making underwater recordings of
icebergs, the sound of water and seals, and soon began to draw a connection
between those sounds and Greenlandic song.”

While
traveling to remote hunting grounds with the Inuit, the artist also collected teeth
and other remnants of the mammals they hunt and used them to make molds for
glass castings. She has now moved on to Bornholm, Denmark, where she’s
beginning to process much of what she discovered in Greenland, in part by attempting
to create sculptures that merge porcelain and glass.

“I was
inspired by the ice and the glaciers – the opacity versus the translucency,”
Streberger says. “The tension between the porcelain and the glass helps make
sense of what’s happening in Greenland now, with the cultural conflict between
the Inuit and the Danish colonizers.”

Streberger’s mentors note that her unique
use of glass gives her work a strong and distinct point of view. “Mara has
proven herself capable of ingenious work that utilizes the fluidity of glass to
capture often overlooked relationships between social, political, economic and
ecological concerns,” says Digital + Media Critic Sara
Wylie. “One of her first projects at RISD captured air
samples in finely wrought and fragile glass vessels. It puzzled her classmates
but spoke beautifully to the scientific and social dilemma that to study
something is in part to destroy it: The moment the vials were un-stoppered the
samples would disperse. The same keen and subtle critical commentary informs
her Fulbright project.”

Now that her Fulbright studies are coming to a close, Streberger
feels like she has only scratched the surface of the arctic ice. So she’s eagerly
looking for grant money that will allow her to return to Greenland and continue
her work. “I originally planned to be in
Greenland for only two months,” she says, “ but things are just starting to
formulate. I’ve learned that an artist really needs this incubation period.”